Choline on the Brain? A Guide to Choline in Chronic Fatigue Syndromehttp://phoenixrising.me/research-2/the-brain-in-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-mecfs/choline-on-the-brain-a-guide-to-choline-in-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-by-cort-johnson-aug-2005
Discuss the article on the Forums.

Interesting until slide 10, when I started to reach for my tin foil hat

Click to expand...

It's kind of hard to avoid thinking that something stinks in the way the illness has been handled. The author is just guessing (in my opinion, poorly). There is a lot more evidence for involvement of the health insurance industry, although actually proving that there is a deliberate effort to deny the biological nature of the illness is very difficult.

I wonder if some sort of analysis like this could be eaisly done on networks of citations too? This whole misadventure could be a useful case-study for those who want to learn about Bad Science.

Click to expand...

There is a concept of citation circles, researchers endlessly citing their colleagues, who cite them. I think we also have to consider review circles, reviewers endlessly approving their colleagues' research, and vice versa.

On military conspiracy, the military do lots of research on things that are not about weapons and warfare, including medicine. They train and deploy large numbers of soldiers and support staff, sometimes at a training cost of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars each ... and then they get sick with something incurable and that investment is lost. A huge amount of money would have been essentially lost because of ME or CFS alone. Why wouldn't the military be interested?

Now questions about why psychobabble has any credence with the military are not a huge mystery either. Soldiers often get PTSD and depression.

There is a concept of citation circles, researchers endlessly citing their colleagues, who cite them. I think we also have to consider review circles, reviewers endlessly approving their colleagues' research, and vice versa.

Click to expand...

There are network graph analysis techniques used to look at social networks that could be applied. I think they are quite computationally expensive and tend to be done using computers with large memories but that is where there are millions of connections. With academic papers there are much fewer.

Citations of course don't mean recommendations as papers that are critical will also cite.